BUILD A GENERAL STRIKE OF ALL WORKERS AND THE COMMUNITY TO TAKE DIRECT CONTROL OF OUR CITY, OUR NEIGHBORHOODS AND OUR WORKPLACES

Rick Snyder has appointed an emergency manager as dictator of Detroit. Mayor Bing and the City Council have gone along. This comes a few months after the people of Michigan voted to overturn the emergency manager law by a solid majority. They stood in long lines to vote. It didn’t matter. A few weeks after the vote, the lame duck legislature passed a new emergency manager law to replace the old one. Business as usual. The vote of the people meant nothing. Capitalist democracy is a sham and a shell game to fool the people and to protect the rich and the powerful.

The central provision of the old emergency manager law and the new one is the same: take the assets and resources of the people of Detroit and pay the banks and the bondholders first and in full. Any crumbs left over can go to schools, ambulances, fire services and other city services. This means the banks and bondholders get paid, while our children continue to receive inadequate education in schools which are falling apart and not properly staffed. It means we don’t have ambulances to take people to the hospital in an emergency. It means fire trucks which don’t work and closed fire stations and fire hydrants which are broken and inoperable. It means our neighborhoods continue to fall apart, and dangerous, abandoned and burnt out homes stay as they are with more being added every day. City workers face pay cuts and union-won contracts are ignored.

This is class war with the banks and their agents in the state government and city government launching an all-out assault on the people of Detroit. The solution is not to return to the mayor and the city council; they are in basic agreement with Snyder and the emergency manager and offer no real alternative. These politicians already had agreed to pay the banks first and to continue to destroy city services. They just weren’t going fast enough for Snyder and the banks.

We have to build our own future. The people of Detroit must organize to take control of their homes and neighborhoods and stop all foreclosures and evictions in our neighborhoods. Students and teachers and families must organize to take control of their schools. All workers in the city must organize to take control of their workplaces. We have to overthrow the dictatorship of the banks. This means overthrowing the emergency manager, the governor and the city officials which serve as collections agents for the banks.

No more business as usual. The resources of the people of Detroit must go directly to schools, ambulances, fire service and other city services. Stop all debt service payments to the banks and use those resources for the people of this city. We have to use direct action and independent action to take control of our city and our lives. No one is coming to save us. We have to do this ourselves, uniting our forces and building alliances with the people of the surrounding communities in this region and beyond.

Half measures will not work. It makes no sense to respond to this dictatorship, this attack on the people of the city, this class war against working people and poor people in Detroit and beyond by going back to the city government which is in the pockets of the banks and the rich investors and go along with the governor and the emergency manager. We are on our own, and we need to face it and recognize it.

The way forward is to build a general strike to shut down the city and overthrow the emergency manager and the dictatorship of the banks. The way forward is to organize, build and fight for the people to take direct control to replace the Dictatorship of the Banks. We need direct action to take direct control of our neighborhoods, our schools, our workplaces and our city. We have to rely on ourselves, and we have allies just like us in other cities and other regions and around the world.